April 9, 2015

The Search for the Perfect Project Management Tool

Project management within an ad agency is a sticky wicket. With designers, producers, analysts, writers, editors and account execs all adding to the pot, needless to say, the creative kitchen can sometimes get crowded. And as our company grows and we bring in new, young talent, and others work from home, our job flow can be affected in many ways. The search for the optimal tool is bottomless.

Here at CCG, we’ve always prided ourselves on being extremely nimble and adaptive. In the twenty years I’ve been managing production, we've grown from 4 employees (I was the 4th) to as many as twenty and somehow the work has always gotten done. I've come to believe, no matter if our project management process has been in our cubes or in the cloud, we'll figure out how to meet the deadline. How is that possible?

My husband is a consultant who helps companies hire the right people based on results from behavioral interviews that measure a person's strengths. One of those strengths is Responsibility. When a person has this trait, they take a lot of pride and ownership in their work. A high sense of loyalty is present as well - loyalty not only to their clients, but to their company and their team.

I’ve been lucky to work at a company where my colleagues are very responsible. To the extreme. Not only does it make my job easier but it pushes me to be at my best. We back each other up and raise each other up, especially when the going gets tough. That’s just the way it is. That’s how it’s always been.

1 Comment

Michael

May 27, 2015

Roxanne raises an important point—no piece of software can take the place of personal accountability and team-oriented skills in an organization’s employees. Thank goodness Clark Creative has that figured out! But that also raises some vital questions: can we cultivate a sense of responsibility and team-mindedness in future members of the workforce? If so, how and when? I’d suggest that marketable skills and traits like these take root long before young people are preparing to transition into the workforce. We need to look much farther upstream for ways to reinforce these qualities of character if we hope to have a really solid pool of talent to recruit from in the future.